Communicating Emotion

Alright. So they’re everywhere: Emoticons. What are they though? They are faces. They express emotion. But what more do they do? Do they do anymore? When they don’t express emotion enough people push further. There’s a website called “My Face When”. The website is full of different avatars, all expressing a multitude of emotions. But there’s something more, something deeper than that.

I feel that even though they are communication emotions, they are communicating on a scale that can only be understood and only could have existed with the growing use of the internet. Phrases like “u mad bro?” and “cool story brah” are really only “emotions” that could have been created with the help of the internet. I might be over thinking a bit, but really. Where else will someone use those “emotions”?

Now people have gone to creating these symbols. Using faces other than human faces they create this meaning. Our world has gone from using 🙂 to using squares, screenshots, drawings, animation, and more, to create our emotions. And we have learned how to communicate with them.

Now to tie it into art. Somehow. Is it art? Is this new way of communication art? How the faces are created? In a way, I think it might not necessarily be an art, but a new way of appreciating arts. There are plenty of these that have been taken from photos, paintings, films, and animation- and recreated to mean something else. So while this isn’t a new form of art itself, it can be argued to be a new form of art appreciation.